Chapter 22 – Reality

Callum cradled his new daughter, looking at her tiny wrinkled face while Lucy slept. The house was quiet, the light filtering in through the windows was warm, and the fresh air blowing in from the garden was sweet. It was peaceful in a way that he hadn’t really experienced since the halcyon days of youth, and all his worries seemed so distant. Though part of that was because most of the things he’d been worried about had been taken care of.

He was certainly glad little Alice had waited to be born until after all the nonsense with Janry and the subsequent reveal to the world. There hadn’t been any terrible incidents he needed to deal with, but there had been lots of shuttling to do while permanent portal infrastructure was being set up. Going public had actually been a relief. A few days of chaotic markets and various level of riot in a few places, but the general public had settled down fairly quickly. Some people, and some governments, were still so obviously hostile to supernaturals that nobody was going to be living there anytime soon, but even something as big as magic existing couldn’t hold the headlines for all that long.

There were still bills passing through the governments of half the countries in the world, debates, endless news articles, but it was just one of many things in the general furor of civilization. The problems weren’t over, but he didn’t have to worry about either a shadow war or a nuclear one. He didn’t even have to worry about the inevitable political nonsense, because he was out of it.

He glanced out of the open door at where Alex was driving around a miniature car in the back yard, and waved at his son. Alex waved back enthusiastically, nearly crashing into the porch, and Callum chuckled, waving again and making a face at his son. While Alex had dutifully met his little sister, there wasn’t much he could do while she was sleeping and Callum was too distracted to try anything else at the moment.

“Hey, I think it’s my turn.”

Callum looked over to where Lucy had woken up, sitting up partway and making grabby hands in his direction. He chuckled and stood up, walking the few paces from the bedroom door and handing over Alice. Lucy cradled her daughter and made kissy noises before looking back up at him.

“Anything happen during my nap?”

“Nah,” Callum said, taking Alice back and settling her into the bassinet offering his hand to her to help Lucy up from the bed. “We got a half-dozen emails about portals but no actual emergencies.”

“Bah, we’re on vacation,” Lucy said, dismissing the inquiries from various presidents, premiers, and kings, and taking his hand to stand up. “They can wait.”

“Yeah,” Callum agreed. He found he was less impressed by such titles after all he’d been through. “I’m still worried I’m going to get a ping from Chester or Taisen and have something dire happening.”

“They can solve their own problems,” Lucy said, the two of them walking outside into the pleasant sunny warmth of their private portal world. “They’ve got mages and dragons and Felicia’s Gates. We’ve put in enough effort.”

In the weeks that followed, most of the demand on House Wells was actually Lucy’s business. Various Houses settling into their own private portal worlds wanted proper internet and, combined with mages clueless about modern electronics, it made for an amusing and frustrating type of tech support. Information infrastructure wasn’t magic, and that was the problem.

She spent a lot of time on the phone, though a great may problems were mitigated when one of the dragons simply created an internet provider. It wasn’t one of the dragons Callum had been properly introduced to, and the provider wasn’t large, but it was good enough. The dragon could simply create new infrastructure from nothing and run optical fibers through tiny feeder portals, so there was just one building and Lucy didn’t have to deal with third or fourth parties to get the installations done.

He spent most of his time with his kids, but in his spare hours Callum found an opportunity to go back to his old profession. While mage Houses were sturdy and well-decorated, many of them were woefully designed. They just aped Gothic or Tudor styles without any real understanding of things like airflow or plumbing or wiring.

It was great fun working with the Guild of Enchanting to create designs that incorporated the possibilities of magic and enchantments along with more conventional infrastructure. He didn’t know who might be using his designs, but they probably didn’t even know the plans came from The Ghost. Like the portal world distribution, it was done through Rossi both because Callum didn’t feel like dickering and because it kept things anonymous.

The money from that was deposited into a new account in a bank run by Miami’s fae prince, Ferrochar. There had been some financial fallout in the markets from the supernatural reveal, just due to panic and speculation, but Ferrochar had so many existing contacts within Earth’s financial space that he’d taken over the bulk of the currency conversions. So far most of the Houses hadn’t bothered to try and sell their services, as they were used to just dealing directly with other mages or fae, but it was only a matter of time.

Unfortunately, while things seemed to be going mostly well when it came to the public knowledge of supernaturals, Chester was still having issues. The media blitz around what had happened at his compound had done a lot of damage, and even an official Presidential pardon didn’t really fix that. Callum was pretty sure that if the government wanted to, they could have cleared up all the legal issues surrounding Chester’s properties and people, but the higher ups weren’t quite so grateful as to remove the leverage they had against the local supernaturals.

“It’ll pass eventually,” Chester said when he visited, lounging appreciatively in a shifter-sized lawn chair. With his own private bad penny and homebond, Chester could travel the portal worlds as he pleased, and the shifter had played host so many times Callum had no problem inviting him over on occasion. “I actually figured it’d be worse, considering everything.”

“Governments don’t like the idea of being manipulated or deceived. At least not when it becomes known,” Callum agreed, teleporting a couple of beers from the fridge. He handed one to Chester, who popped the stop off with a flick of his thumb.

“Exactly. Not being able to read in some of my allies ahead of time hurt, too. I wanted to, but Janry jumped the gun.” Chester shrugged and took a drink. “Still, I have to admit I’m a little disappointed, and I was thinking about other options for the future.”

“Yeah?” Callum raised his eyebrows, stretched out in his own chair watching Alex and a half-dozen shifter kids tear around the front yard. “I mean, I’d be happy to find you a portal world, but you’re kind of stuck to the Deep Wilds, aren’t you?”

“Sadly, yes. But I was thinking about the future. Ultimately the Deep Wilds portal itself needs to be moved somewhere that isn’t owned by one government or another. Some of my pack are putting together a pressure chamber and we might prevail upon you to move it to the seafloor somewhere.” Chester’s hand snapped out to catch a flying foam football, tossing it back to the kids.

“That is not a problem,” Callum assured him.

“The same team is also putting together a larger pressurized compound,” Chester confided “I’ve got a somewhat trickier request. I know that you have portals out in space. Given that all the land on Earth is more or less claimed, what about the moon?”

“Ha! Werewolves on the moon,” Callum said with a laugh. “I know you aren’t werewolves but it still amuses me.

“Wait until Lucy hears about it,” Chester said dryly. “I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I think there’s even a song about it,” Callum agreed with a smile. “Absolutely doable, though. I honestly thought about doing that myself, but a portal world is a lot more livable. Since that isn’t an option for you…” He shrugged and sipped at his own beer. “Keep in mind I’m still not great at transporting large things. I’ll have to bring it over in pieces.”

“Believe me, just being able to casually transport stuff to the moon’s surface is more than enough.” Chester lifted his beer in salute. “Especially if it means that nobody’s going to find out I’m taking up room in a national park.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that certain people would hold that against you,” Callum agreed, reaching out through his moon nexus and grabbing a space drone. Chester’s request clearly wasn’t all that time-sensitive, but Callum figured he might as well pull up a visual while they were talking. He didn’t want to bother Lucy, who was pestering Lisa for cookie recipes, so he pulled his laptop to him and brought up the feed himself. “I can imagine a bunch of people are going to be mad if you’re the first moon colonist too, but oh well.”

“Can’t please everyone,” Chester agreed, leaning over to look at the feed of the stark moonscape. “That is absolutely surreal.”

“There’s a reason why I’m glad I found this place,” Callum said, gesturing out at the sunny day, the pleasant breeze, the rainbows of blowing mist in the distance from island waterfalls. “The moon sounds great and all, but it’s really not that exciting.”

“You’re definitely biased,” Chester said with a chuckle. “I don’t think I’d like to stay here long term myself, but you’re damned lucky you found something this good.”

“I admit it,” Callum said. “Though there are some nice ones for the other mage Houses. A few you’d probably like, all forests. I think only one or two have serious beasts like the Deep Wilds or the Night Lands though. Let alone something like Faerie.” His personal theory was that all the portal worlds that had any significant presence had already broken through to Earth. It didn’t seem a coincidence that, aside from certain exceptions, all the portal worlds he found were small and barren, relatively speaking.

“We’ll stick with the Deep Wilds and the moon for now,” Chester said. “There’s no emergency.” Callum nodded agreement and the two of them sipped beer for a while until Lucy and Lisa vanished into the house.

“There they go,” Callum said with a laugh.

“Well, you’re in for it,” Chester said. “I’ll give a you a warning.”

“Oh?” Callum lifted his eyebrows inquiringly.

“It takes a lot of exercise to work off those cookies,” Chester said. “Lisa’s recipe is addictive.”

Chester’s visit prodded Callum to go and finish some of the half-considered projects he’d started before the crisis. There wasn’t any reason to put things off anymore, aside from laziness and his preoccupation with the new addition to his family. The latter was a good reason, but the former wasn’t.

First, he made a permanent portal between his pocket universe and reality. After the dragon portal, he didn’t have much trouble even if it was a lot of effort. He had to buy more vis crystals, but at this point he had enough spare wealth that was not a problem.

“So what’s the plan here?” Lucy said, holding Alice and peering through the portal at the tiny island on the other side. Alex jumped back and forth through the portal threshold, from rock to grass and back again.

“Moon portal,” Callum said, watching Alex just in case he jumped too far and fell in the ocean. “I’ll buy one of Chester’s habitats and put it up by the nexus. That way there’s magic there and I don’t have to replace stuff so often, and on the off chance we lose our drones there’s a way back to our home reality. Plus, I know you love the moon nexus. I figure you’d love a space room too.”

“Ooh!” Lucy grinned, her eyes sparkling as she envisioned it. “Absolutely. If there’s enough radiation shielding we can even take the kids. Does magic heal radiation damage? Gayle will want to find out I guess…”

“All of that,” Callum agreed. “I guess for now, though, we can take a beach day.”

“Beach day!” Alex cheered, and ran off to the house to get his things.

After the permanent connection was a success and he had a permanent link to the moon, Callum finally was ready to approach something he’d promised a very long time ago. Frankly he was surprised that Shahey had been so patient, but perhaps he’d been busy with the supernatural reveal. Or maybe dragons were just so long-lived that the delay wasn’t really noticeable. Either way, Callum needed to figure out how to create portals to Earth from the portal worlds — and to whatever other universes the portal worlds bordered.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Of all the extant portals, it was Portal World Five’s connection that was, surprisingly, the most useful for that. Mictlān’s portal was too strange, the Deep Wilds was too messy. The Fae portal seemed to be partly fae magic, and of course the dragonlands portal had been opened from Earth-side. The sea portal was the only one with a useful structure to crib from, and with his existing expertise he was able to get a sense of what changes he needed to make.

Interestingly, the incoming structure, to jump from portal worlds to real universes, didn’t seem to work on the Earth side of things, whereas the outgoing dimensional portal still functioned in portal worlds. There was obviously some complexity to the higher-dimensional topology that he didn’t understand, but actually trying to map out the way all the magic and physics worked together was a job for someone else.

He used one of the more barren and useless portal worlds for testing, a stretch of orange desert sand under a dull red sky, and punched holes in various directions. Some of them led back to the starting section in Arizona, but most did not. Straying too far from the point of origin or using the initial dimensional pattern usually meant the portal attempts just collapsed, but there were a few points of congruency with some other place.

The little portal he made in the test world showed a completely different stretch of desert, sand and scrub and unfamiliar mountains. He hastily closed the portal and marked the area, but didn’t go any further than that for the moment. It might well be just a deserted region, but if it was some other inhabited world he didn’t want to kick off any potential problems by leaking magic through.